FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT MIDDLE SCHOOL - PAGE 3

When the Pennsbury School District put together a $12.5 million budget last year for its controversial new middle school in Lower Makefield, the School District provided for a contingency fund of $461,000. Usually, only about 2 percent of a contingency fund is used, the project manager said. But the board learned Monday that the fund may barely cover all of the changes it must make. For when the construction budget was put together last year, the Lower Makefield supervisors had not approved the project, nor had they given their list of conditions.

The Enfield Middle School is getting ready to take a long, hard look at itself. School officials are preparing packets of information, and teachers and students are spiffing up classrooms in anticipation of a three-day visit from a team of teachers and administrators from other Montgomery County school districts. The visitors on Feb. 6, 7 and 8 will evaluate every aspect of life at the school, from the subjects that are taught to the report cards that are sent home. Theresa Felix, principal of the middle school, said she thought scrutiny from outsiders could only help the Enfield school do a better job. "Outsiders can give us a picture of where we are and what we could be doing to be better," Felix said.

When about 1,400 students arrive at the Howard M. Phifer Middle School today, they will head to their lockers, shut their backpacks inside, and leave them there until the final bell rings in the afternoon. School officials last week decided to bar students from carrying book bags during the school day at Phifer after learning that a sixth grader had taken two guns to school last Monday. The 12-year-old accidentally shot himself in the left hand at a friend's house after school that day, authorities said.

Filmed almost entirely within a generic classroom and prisonish play yard at a middle school in the melting-pot 20th arrondissement of Paris, The Class keenly observes the awkward dance of education. He who leads gets his feet stepped on. Those who don't follow, push and pull the teacher until he is tied into a pretzel twist and struggles to untie himself. At least one essential difference between American movies and their Gallic counterparts is highlighted in the remarkable film where Francois Marin, Parisian middle-school teacher, gamely faces students who challenge his ideals and authority.

Parents of fifth and sixth graders in the Marple Newtown School District received official notification this week that a middle-school program would be instituted at Paxon Hollow Junior High School in September. The school, on Paxon Hollow Road in Broomall, will add sixth graders to its student population of seventh- and eighth-grade students. The district's four elementary schools will house kindergarten through fifth grade. Children who are now in fifth grade at the Culbertson, Loomis, Russell and Worrall Schools will be attending Paxon Hollow in September along with current sixth graders, who would normally be switching to Paxon Hollow.

The New Hope-Solebury school board presented the first draft of a five-year plan at its Monday meeting, the result of a series of brainstorming sessions with parents, students and teachers. "This kind of long-range planning is of utmost importance," superintendent Irene Bender said in an interview. "Without a definitive plan, we will simply go along trying to be all things to all people. " Among the proposals are developing a middle school (sixth to eighth grades); improving language-arts teaching; introducing a system to evaluate faculty; improving the high school facilities, especially expanding the library, and involving local artists and professionals in teaching elective courses as adjunct faculty.

She was 44 years old by the time she got the bachelor's degree that validated her status as a teacher, but no midlife career change was about to daunt Helen A. Fort of Pemberton Township. Fort taught for 25 years altogether in her hometown before retiring in 1985. And still not satiated, she ran for a seat on the township school board and is now serving her fifth year on the board. Nevertheless, she'll find it a little strange when the township's new middle school is discussed - the Board of Education named it after her. Fort, 70, said she was "pleased but very humble" when the board decided July 10 that the former Pemberton Township High School No. 1 would become the Helen A. Fort Middle School.

With a half-day pep talk for teachers, consultant Nancy Doda set the tone for the year for middle school students at Kingsway Regional. Doda is a nationally known author and expert on middle school education who travels the world extolling the virtues of a separate middle school education. She told teachers that students in seventh and eighth grades need special care, especially today. "There was a magic rite of passage (for past generations) that doesn't exist" anymore, Doda told a group of about 200 area teachers at the Kingsway auditorium last week.

As rising enrollment fills its buildings, the Wissahickon school board has proceeded with plans to expand the middle school. At a meeting Monday night, the board voted, 8-0, to authorize Rienzi Associates Architects of Jenkintown to develop plans and specifications for the additions to the school at Houston and Dager Roads in Ambler. Board member Phyllis F. Catz was absent. In a feasibility study outlined to the board at a meeting last month, the architects presented the plan for the $7.4 million expansion, which includes the addition of 18 classrooms, a multipurpose gym room and several auxiliary rooms.

Architects hired by the Downingtown area school board have a plan for a new middle school - a doughnut-shaped building that would cost $23 million and sit behind the existing high school. Representatives of the Vitetta Group, an architectural firm in Philadelphia, described at the board's work session last week how they had arrived at the sketch design for a 1,200-student middle school. The district is pursuing plans to construct a new middle school after the school board voted last month, under intense public pressure, to scrap plans to build a new high school.